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Open CASCADE Technology 6.2.1

Open CASCADE S.A.S. is pleased to announce a new Open CASCADE Technology maintenance release version 6.2.1.
Maintenance releases are exclusively available to all Open CASCADE customers.

This new maintenance release of Open CASCADE Technology 6.2.1 introduces some new features and bug fixes. Some new features and improvements included in this release are:
- Implementation of support of UTF8 encoding for extended strings, and Unicode symbols in IGES;
- Implementation of protection against concurrent construction / destruction of Handle objects;
- Improvement of compatibility with STL and Windows-specific code;
- Performance and functional improvements in MeshVS package;
- New advanced selection mode in MeshVS for efficient work with big meshes;
- New standard attributes included in OCAF;
- Implementation of reading of ACIS SAT versions 10.0 - 14.0;
- Improvement of tools for reading and writing NASTRAN files in OMF;
- New tools for export of 2D geometrical data to DXF.

I'm happy that Open Cascade SAS have released some bug fixes, but as a potential open source user it makes me a little nervous that the open source version doesn't also benefit from these fixes. This release tells me that OCC are distributing known buggy code for which they already have fixes. Seem like an odd thing to do.

This is the standard MO for OCC. They have done it this way ever since going "open source". They typically release 2 or 3 maintenance releases to their paying customers before releasing a new open source version with all the fixes.

I don't like it either, but I sort of understand their motivation. Service contracts are their only source of income.

True...When this all started, they would release maintenance releases every few months and would release an public update a minimum of once a year. Since the last public release (6.2) was in March 2007, hopefully we will se another by the middle of next year.